In this week's Voice I wrote about the recently flipped 101.9 FM, whichafter an abortive effort at being an FM news/talk hybridis back to playing commercial "alternative" rock. I listened to a lot of the station's programming during its first seven days on the air, and while I was often pleasantly surprised by the choices of recurrents and the quality/low yarl quotient of the newer songs played I kept thinking that there were songs that could have slotted into the current (and pretty decent!) playlist very easilyor, at the very least, be elegantly swapped out for every third play of the noxiously "funky" likes of Sublime, 311, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Seven suggested tracks, both from the new arrivals stack and the recent alt-rock archives, after the jump.

When Icona Pop's banging, rattling "I Love It" came out a month ago, the reaction to it from the pop cognoscenti was pretty immediate. Its lyrics about romantic emancipation from a dude who's a dud, a searing sine-wave synth line, and a shouted chorus of "I-DON'T-CAAAAAA-ARE, I LOVE IT!" made it an ideal candidate for the Twittersphere's Dream Song Of The Summerthat scrappy, Scandinavian-via-Internet-borne David that could potentially slay Goliaths like Rihanna and Carly Rae Jepsen and achieve if not world, then at least bodega domination.

In this week's Voice I offered up a midseason report of sorts, listing 12 particularly outstanding tracks from this year. Here, for your listening pleasure, are the 12 songs in streamable form (via a combination of YouTube and Soundcloud so as to not lock anyoneor any songsout). Happy listening, and if you'd like to share a 2012 song that's particularly tickled your ears, by all means do so in the comments.

"This icona pop video got the "arcade fire newsbreak 2008" blogger treatment, huh?," tweeted the blogger who runs The Culture Of Me a little while ago, and, well, a brief Twitter search will show you that yes, there's a fair amount of online chatter surrounding the Swedish pop duo's new video for "Manners," a glitched-out campfire singalong with a persistent hooknot quite at the level of "#beliebersarewinning," but enough to move the "take notice, music people" needle. Of course, releasing a video with people decked out in dayglo paint is a surefire way to get on the minds (and in the blog backends) of those people who've just returned from not-long-enough long weekends. But it helps that the song, which stomps like "Closer" but possesses a deliciously petulant hook, is very good as well. Clip after the jump.